I was at an art opening the other night because my friend's band was playing and ran into a lot of people I hadn't seen in awhile. "So what have you guys been up to?" a few of them asked.

"Well, we have this dog cart. . ."

Frankly, for the last month life hasn't been about much else. Every morning, the kids and the dog get more and more antsy until we take it out. Every afternoon, after the boy naps, we drag it out to the playground and gradually all the neighborhood kids show up, and before I know it I'm giving dog wagon rides to everyone under four-feet tall, all around the neighborhood. This could be the start of a new venture; add a chicken petting zoo and a free trampoline and we're in business.

[I finally put together that "how to build a dirt-cheap dog cart" post; you can see it here]

I have spent the last four years of my life as a beast of burden, schlepping the kids and all their gear around, and I must admit a real pleasure in shifting that load to another creature. I put those two kids in the wagon and watch the dog trot merrily down the sidewalk bearing their weight and suddenly I can move like Gene Kelly. Even without the sprightly tap-dancing, the whole contraption creates something of a spectacle. Everywhere we go, cars stop moving in the road while cell phones point at us from open windows. Even a female mounted cop rubbernecked when she walked past us down Gratiot Ave:

I do prefer to keep it away from roads (we only take it along a road on our way to the market), and luckily there's a mile-long below-grade bike trail that runs through our neighborhood. Down there, I can even let them go without holding the leash. I am considering rigging up a simple system of reigns and a brake for these moments. Giddyup, the boy shouts. This is really fun, the girl shouts back at me, over and over, as I race to catch up.

There is a part of me that wishes I could just take the kids in their dog wagon to the grocery store or the pizza parlor without causing a scene, but I understand it's out of the ordinary. It's the sort of thing that's easier to get away with in Detroit than it would be elsewhere; I can't imagine doing it in Park Slope, and even though I wish we didn't always cause any scene there is something to be said for the number of smiles we create during every trip we take out the front door. I imagine this is sort of what it's like to be outrageously attractive, to have strangers smile all the time or say nice things or buy you drinks. I feel pretty lucky to have rigged up something that creates so many tiny moments of joy.

And yet, we've had a few nasty confrontations. One lady saw the dog's naturally white muzzle and assumed he was older than his four years, telling us that he was "way to old to be doing that much work." Another woman shook her head and finger at me, "You're putting your children's lives in the hands of that dog," to which I later wish I'd replied, When we take any big dog, or any street dog into our homes, don't we all? I looked at Wendell and knew I trusted him completely, but couldn't get too angry at this woman. She didn't know into what good paws I've entrusted my children.

* * * * *

We adopted Wendell more than three years ago. The guy who brought him to the shelter said he found him wandering alone near 7 Mile and John R, a particularly rough spot in a rough town for dogs. And yet he came to us so mild-mannered and eager to please. We have this strange conviction that he endured so much misery on the streets he still doesn't realize that our small gestures of ownership aren't worthy of his goodness, his near-perfect behavior.  There, I said it: he is almost a perfect dog. I haven't written much about that because there isn't much to say about perfection. Sure it would be more entertaining to regale you with Marley & Me-style hi-jinks, but other than the occasional smelly dog fart we don't have much to complain about. It is almost daily we remind ourselves of that decisive moment at the animal shelter, knowing that this particular creature was either destined for a needle the next day or the next decade in our home, and we tell ourselves that we definitely made the right decision: we definitely got the best one.

I read an article once in the Washington Post where some woman said of her lovely daughter adopted from China, "I think we got the best one." This is something you could never say about a genetic child (you should feel it, sure, but never say it), but I found it so endearing to read those words. It was so beautiful, I think, to see such an expression of falling so deeply in love with a child she had no part in creating.

In the same vein, I hope you will forgive me for stealing a bit of that sentiment and apply it to our mutt, for we had nothing at all to do with him. We never trained him. He came to us this way from the streets. He has never strayed more than a few feet from our own. True, he could be a better dock jumper, but he makes up for it with proven Frisbee catching and tree climbing skills. He has tolerated the abuses of infant fingers and toddler rides without so much as rolling one brown eye, and yet he becomes all teeth and throat the moment anyone jiggles our doorknob. He pulls our kids around the neighborhood with protective purpose, and pride.

He's a good one, guys. A good friend. Almost as good as yours, I bet.

If you have any comments about this post, I'd love to see you add them to the kind words already left at the first post, here. 

So I was inside one of those massive warehouse stores the other day (hint: it rhymes with Lost Dough) and the entire time I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to turn the experience into a blog post. This is what I have been reduced to: everything I do gets run through a battery of tests to determine whether it's worthy of distilling down to a few hundred words of purple prose with the requisite self-deprecating quips thrown in with a few unnecessary French or Latin words and plenty of self-aggrandizing links to previous posts followed by a couple of new photos and a pithy conclusion. It's like I'm back in college and I've got to crank out an essay once a week. You guys are like scary invisible professors. Are the people who came for the Detroit stuff still out there now that I've stopped writing about all the broken shit? Are there enough kid stories for those who found the site when I was scrotum-shrivelingly identified as a top mommyblogger? And I'm afraid I can offer only disappointment to the gentleman from Qatar who found this site while googling for pictures of "bowling pins in vaginas." I apologize, sir. Our focus is root vegetables here.

So I'm walking along the checkout aisles, mentally composing some text with my trademarked insipid moralizing:

"I am suddenly reminded of the French reporter who contacted me last week about stopping in Detroit while blogging her way across the country like some post-industrial De Tocqueville. If Alexis De Tocqueville himself were to travel across America today he would find no sight more American than this line of consumers herding their oversized shopping carts filled with oversized purchases out of the big box warehouse store, like drones doing their patriotic duty in the ant colony we call AMERIKKKA. . ."™

Blech, shut the hell up already you asshole. Then I remember why we're there in the first place and consider a few petty digs at my in-laws:

"Every time my father-in-law visits from Pittsburgh he stops at his Costco on the way out of town and brings us, among other things, a box of 24 mangoes, a 6-pack of flashlights, and several plastic wheeled vehicles for the kids. Last year he bought us a membership for Christmas because apparently he mistook our efforts to minimize household clutter for a glut of empty space just waiting to be filled by tent-sized tins of biscotti and 64-oz jars of capers. We were going to wait until our apocalypse bunker was ready before we cashed in the membership, but we really needed to pick up another 50-gallon drum of cheap blended Scotch for when my mother-in-law visits. . ."

But your in-laws read the blog, I tell myself. Ixnay on the Ewarsday. As I'm brainstorming some other inevitably pretentious perspective on the whole experience, I suddenly grow fearful that someone is going to recognize me (like that time I rushed through closing elevator doors at a giant suburban shopping mall called "The Somerset Collection" and a cute girl inside said, "Are you Jim from Sweet Juniper?' and for a moment I contemplated diving through the glass elevator into the fake ficus plants below to avoid the shame of being caught with a J.Crew bag in my hands). Then I scold myself for being a narcissistic swellhead who thinks he's going to be recognized because of his stupid blog. It's not like you're a real celebrity, like French Stewart or Bronson Pinchot, I think, and my wounded, empty-scrotumed puppy of an ego responds sotto voce, "But some online magazine did say I was a top mommyblogger, you asshole."

The truth is I'm at the Costco because I want some cheap digital cameras to give to some kids but things aren't all that cheap* and I'm looking around for a twenty pack of disposable film cameras and I end up harassing the poor woman at the photo developing department because they have a photo developing department but don't sell film or disposable cameras. I give up and look for my wife who's choosing between the twenty pound bag of frozen shrimp and the thirty pound bag. There's nothing in the store I want so I turn my attention to my children and think, well this is cute, maybe there's a post here:

"The kids sat side-by-side in the massive shopping cart, confused, I think, by this new two-abreast seating arrangement, or, perhaps, by the Brobdingnagian nature of the overall experience, for who wouldn't feel tiny next to a canister of Whoppers taller than a third-grader or the box of Q-Tips their mother just put in the cart that surely will one day be scraping their own grandchildren's cochleae. . ."

Oh shut up, I finally say. It's just a trip to Costco. We've all heard the jokes about the oversized quantities. No one cares what you think. Why don't you write a blog post about what a fucking loser you are?

Voila.

Fin.

________
*I am giving some Detroit kids cameras to document their lives; it is part of a larger project I plan to reveal at the beginning of May.  I was hoping to find some 3-6 megapixel cameras at a reasonable price, not just to be cheap but to make it a non-issue if they are lost for reasons beyond the kids' control. Apparently the major camera makers preferred to grind up all those 3-6 megapixel sensors in some Shanghai dump rather than make digital cameras to sell for less than $150; an astute reader just e-mailed me to note that some Sweet Juniper readers might have old cameras languishing in closets after being replaced by more advanced technology (we are giving our trusty old Kodak Easyshare DX4330 to the kids). If you have an older point-and-shoot digital or a 35mm film camera in working order that you'd like to donate, I'd love it if you'd e-mail me so we can talk. Thanks to the overwhelming response from readers, I now have more than enough cameras to get this project started. Thanks to everyone who contacted me!

 
When I was ten I spent the winter reading a lot of Jack London and building a dog sled. After cutting the wood and nailing it all together, I set it out in the snow and tied it to our youthful Labrador Retriever, ordering her to mush. She just sat there mulishly and gave me a look that told me to get a goddamn Siberian Husky.

One of the best things about being an incredibly childish adult is that there's nobody to tell you that you can't use the power tools. Or in this case, a simple ratchet and screwdriver, because that's all I used to turn our old jogging stroller into a wagon that our German Shorthaired Pointer has been joyfully pulling around the neighborhood for a week. And with this I have further cemented my reputation as a total nutjob among all our neighbors:

 

That double jogging stroller gave us a wonderful summer of use, but it had front alignment issues and it was taking up a lot of space in our basement. When I was trying to figure out how to build an axle for a dog wagon, I remembered the jogging stroller and just took it apart to use the back axle and wheels and then detached some of the tubing to create the wagon shafts. I used about twelve $1.59 hose clamps to attach everything together, knowing that I would have to make adjustments later and not wanting to drill anything yet. But the clamps (which require only a standard-head screwdriver) have turned out to be really strong. I took the handlebar seat from the Popscycle and attached it with a five inch bolt between the foot rests and an extra large clamp in the rear:

I can take it off again pretty quickly when we want to go for a bike ride. I'm still working on a second seat; right now the girl will occasionally sit in the basket on a broke-down toy horse we found at the thrift store. I'm rigging up a seat belt and handle this week. Most of the time only one kid rides in it, and when we take the wagon to the market the groceries go in the basket (that was scavenged from the neighbors' trash). You could probably make something similar out of any jogging stroller (we used a Babyjogger Twinner II) or one of those kid trailers you pull behind a bike. If there's any interest, I can post a more detailed how-to so you can build one for your kids and dog(s). I'd really love to see wagon pulled by a team!

I did a lot of research on the types of carts used in recreational dog carting and I was happy to read that a two-bicycle wheel sulky like this is much easier on a dog than a heavier four-wheel wagon. I also researched the harness that the dog would need to wear, and determined I could either pay $70 for a nylon "one size fits all" harness, or make a leather one myself that fits Wendell perfectly. I found diagrams online for a standard Siwash harness and went to the thrift store and bought five or six of the best quality leather belts they had. The big coup came when I was on the way out of the store and noticed an old leather golf bag loaded with brass rings, clamps, padded leather straps, and tons of good leather, all for $3.40. I bought a bag of leather rivets and used an awl to puncture the leather and put the harness together making sure he had a nice padded piece across his chest. I had to figure out a way to keep the shafts away from his body while still allowing him to steer the wagon and after a bit of experimentation I got it right:

The shafts are just for steering; he "pulls" the wagon with leather traces. I still have a bit of fine tuning to do, but I'm pretty happy with how it all came out, using almost exclusively recycled materials and spending only around $30 for everything I needed to complete both the wagon and the harness.

* * * * *

This is the good part.

Now, I fully expect to get some nasty e-mails/comments from dog lovers telling me this is cruel. Never mind that we're not trekking across the Yukon Territory here (we're just trotting around our neighborhood). Never mind that he's pulling children, not adults. Never mind that dogs have been pulling carts for hundreds of not thousands of years. I would even agree that for some dogs this sort of thing might be cruel. Carting is not for every dog, but I will say that it is for our dog. He has boundless energy, and we went for a 5-mile run every day for several weeks before we started carting just so I could be sure he'd be in good enough shape after the long winter. He loves to be outside. It would be far more cruel to leave this dog in his crate while we played outside. His tail wags the entire time he's pulling and he dances around with excitement whenever I pull out the harness and move the wagon towards the front door. While he carts I keep hold of his leash and he pulls against the leash as though the wagon isn't even there. He wants to jog with the wagon and when I get out of breath and stop he turns to look back at me as if to say, Come on, fat ass. This is more fun if we run. I didn't even really have to train him for any of this; the first few times he was strapped in I rewarded him with treats whenever he made a confident turn or if he came when called. But this adopted Detroit street dog truly is a natural. When he started pulling the wagon with the kids, he became even more careful, as if he knew his kids were in there and it was his job to keep them safe. He even loses interest in squirrels.

Wherever we go, we hear a lot of the same comments, but my favorite so far is, Those are the luckiest kids ever. Who wouldn't want to get pulled around in a wagon by a beloved dog, his tail tickling your knees as it wags? We've taken practically every kid in the neighborhood for a ride around the block. The girl's best friend shouted, "I want to do this every day!"

Gram insists on wearing his new "cowboy" hat every time we go out in the wagon, and we have totally been dressing him like an Amish boy. I am planning to buy one of those orange reflective triangles you see on the back of buggies the next time I stop by the Feed & Seed, just in case one of those Yoder boys are on Rumspringa and don't see him as he circles the playground. 

Here's a very shaky video I made as I ran backwards ahead of the wagon trying to get some perspective other than me holding the leash. This is not how we ordinarily do this (but don't worry, we were on a very safe sidewalk and I was never more than a few steps away):

So I've been working on some fun community projects that have been sucking away some of the free time I have to write blog posts. One thing we're planning is making a thousand (or more) wildflower seed bombs with some kids in a few weeks, but first we wanted to experiment at home before we drag all the materials over to the neighborhood where we're going to set up the seed bomb assembly line. Seed bombs, if you don't already know, are an old hippie guerrilla gardening technique of mixing soil, seed, and compost into a throw-able device in order to "plant" wildflowers in inaccessible lots or just overgrown places on the side of the road. As you've probably noticed from my photos, there are a lot of places in Detroit that look like this:

Illegal dumping is a huge problem here. I went through a pile of dumped belongings a few weeks ago and found wedding albums, tchotchkes, and unopened mail from a house in a suburban community where I presume the owner died and someone was paid to haul the contents away and didn't want to pay the disposal fee at an actual dump. I've also seen suburban rat poison dumped in the city. But many Detroiters are just as guilty of treating their city like a trash heap. I can't tell you how many times we've walked behind someone who just tossed an empty bag of chips or soda bottle on the ground just feet away from a garbage can. The best evidence of this annoying behavior is usually a chain-link fence somewhere near a bus stop on a windy day:

Well, Spring is here and we figure it makes sense to start tossing something into overgrown lots other than garbage. We started by heading up to Busy Bee Hardware for the basic ingredients.

When we brought our native wildflower seed packets, potting soil, and plant fertilizer (don't hate, you hippies) up to the counter and told Sandy what we were doing, she refused to let me pay for any of it. When I threatened to leave a sawbuck on the counter, Roy advised from across the store that it was definitely not in my best interest to do so. I promised to make our huge purchase for the full project at Busy Bee and walked out wondering when the last time a cashier at Home Depot fell so in love with the story of a project that she let the customer walk out without paying for any of the materials. At the store, Sandy and I speculated about how we were going to get the seed balls to stick together. She suggested using emptied eggshells and I told her the old hippies used Christmas ornaments. Clay was the consensus. I didn't want to go to the art store to buy fancy (and expensive) molding clay, and it occurred to me that kitty litter was just clay pellets. I went to the nearest pet store and sure enough, the cheapest kitty litter available listed clay as its only ingredient. 

We waited for the next sunny day and went outside with a bucket of potting soil, a bunch of different wildflower seeds, a big bowl of kitty litter, and a 2-liter of water (in which we mixed some of the miracle grow). The kid poured the water onto some kitty litter until it turned into nice plain clay:

We started with a few seeds, balled them up in the soil, and then surrounded the soil with a layer of clay. The idea is that when thrown, the hardened clay will break and the seeds will flourish in the soil (ideally, the soil would also have some compost rather than fertilizer mixed in). When we used up all the seeds, we'd made 60 or so bombs (each had about five seeds inside):

We lined up the balls to bake in the heat of the afternoon sun, and then went inside to wash our hands. After a few hours, the balls were grayish and hard, and we put them in their secret-seed-bomb satchels. I put mine in the old Freitag messenger back I bought on eBay back in 2003 when everyone was making simple text posters with Helvetica and the Swiss could do no wrong:

The girl put hers in a fanny pack we found at the thrift store. My wife said the only way it could be better would be if it had the Jordache mustang on it:

Soon (right before the next good rain) we'll be off to start seed bombing Detroit. I'll take before/after pictures of the spots we bomb to see if it works. There is, however, a part of me that won't be crushed if somebody tries to steal that tempting Jordache fanny pack out of our car or bike and then finds themselves wondering why we keep a fanny pack filled with tiny balls of poo.

I'm no professional hippie; if anyone wants to POLITELY offer some advice about how we could do this better I'd be glad to hear it. We're going to be getting a lot of little hands dirty making these in a few weeks and I want to make sure we do it right.

There's an old legend around these parts about a red dwarf who is seen before or during disasters that have befallen the city of Detroit. He's called the Nain Rouge, a child-sized creature in furry boots with "blazing red eyes and rotten teeth." He's sort of a cross between the Mothman and the Mobile Leprechaun. When I started telling my daughter stories about the Nain Rouge he was a harbinger of doom, but frankly the kid has never really been all that into doom so I had to turn him into a nice 600-year-old Francophone imp who lives in a hole at the base of a tree behind our house, smoking a long Peterson pipe and playing a wee accordion. Soon he was riding around in a chariot pulled by four pheasants and herding rabbits away from wily foxes. Whenever I suggest that he might have something to do with the fire that burned down the city in 1805 or some other calamity, she insists he's innocent. "He's just misunderstood," she tells me, a phrase that has become sort of a catch-all defense of any monster who might ordinarily scare her. Frankenstein, vampires, zombies, hobgoblins, mummies: they're all just "misunderstood." I sense a bleeding-heart liberal in the works here, folks.

Last weekend some 200 local goofballs and hooligans participated in a march to drive the Nain Rouge from the city. There was the promise of a marching band, costumes, dogs, and a good old-fashioned effigy burning. When I told the kid about La Marche du Nain Rouge, she insisted that we not participate in any banishment parade. In this household, we are pretty serious about not crossing the wee folk. Also, I feel fairly strongly that when you're a city hemorrhaging population as quickly as Detroit, you shouldn't be exiling anyone (even impish doom harbingers). So we decided it was the perfect occasion for a protest and busted out the placards.

On Saturday, some friends stopped by our house and stumbled upon our preparations. One of these friends happens to be really, really short and a really, really good sport and when she heard about our counter-demonstration in defense of the red dwarf, they headed straight for the thrift store to get a red outfit for her to wear during the parade. They even went to the craft store to get red face paint and extra placards. At some point she was worried she might make the marchers actually feel guilty but I was all YES, GOOD. Make them feel guilty! LONG LIVE THE RED DWARF! After we made our signs, I wasted no time writing up some literature [link goes to PDF of our flier] to hand out. I had way too much fun writing that (it's not often that I get to write in the slang of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century foppish dandy). I spent more time trying to ligature that text than writing it.  

The Friends of the Nain Rouge met up along the parade route and prepared some chants and our lovely Nain Rouge practiced glowering while smoking a cigar and drinking from a chalice filled with a fine wine made from the blood of early French voyageurs.

Here I am trying to teach the kid how to do a terrifying impish jig:

One little Nain Rouge in training was ready to give that angry mob a piece of her mind:

As the parade passed, nobody really took any of my literature. I think our protest was more confusing than convincing:

[three previous photos, credit Alex Wright]

The kid decided that the marching band and the people in the costumes were terrifying and hid behind her sign. I was left to shout "Don't blame the dwarf!" all by myself. Pathetic. I was all, "You guys! We have to stay in character!" and they were all, Um, we don't really know that man.

After the parade passed us we realized we still had an actual, face-painted Nain Rouge in our midst, so she drove us around to various Detroit landmarks for impromptu photo shoots. Oops, looks like it's going to be another lukewarm season for the Motor City Kitties (that's what you get for putting Curtis Granderson in pinstripes, you assholes).

After that shot with the Spirit of Detroit statue we were planning to do a shot with the Nain Rouge fist-bumping the Joe Louis Fist, but suddenly this weird voice came out of a hidden loudspeaker ordering her off the podium. Nain Rouge, please step away from the Spirit of Detroit. We were being watched! Was it the ghost of Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac? We hightailed it out of there and decided that if the Nain Rouge really were to appear in contemporary Detroit, it would probably be at a casino.

The Nain Rouge lost about $7.00, but her appearance foretold gloom and doom for at least 600 people chain smoking menthols and staring at her while losing nickel after nickel in the glow of a thousand jabbering slot machines.

[if you are at all interested in other stories of early Detroit history and folklore, check out one of my favorite new blogs, The Night Train] 

I was sitting with my son at the dining room table a few days ago and I heard myself say, "Just eat two bites of your pizza and I'll give you a gummi bear." Then I punched myself in the jaw.

Really I just sat there while those words echoed, batted back and forth by my conscience. Did I really just promise a gummi bear as a reward for eating pizza? That's like congratulating a kid for drinking chocolate milk or telling him he'd better finish those potato chips (two things I am quite certain I have done, now that I think about it). I could hear pre-parent know-it-all Jim clucking at me from the nth-dimension. Please tell me there are hippies out there who feel guilty when they have to say, Just eat two more spoonfuls of kaleloaf and I'll let you have one carob-sunflower-seed square? What kind of brainwashed little hippiespawn would eat kaleloaf without the mildly-disappointing promise of a carob confection?  As much as I admire parents who have never allowed refined sugar to pass their children's lips, I seethe with too much insecurity and shame to not hate such motherfuckers a bit too. Without gummi bears nothing would get done in our house. Gummi bears are the very mortar that keep our walls from tumbling down.

After my overly-generous promise, my sugarloving son looked at me and defiantly stated in his Wookiee language that he wanted a gummi bear but would not touch the pizza. Then he crossed his arms over his chest. I had a moment of panic.

A few months ago I went through a phase where I'd cook a meal from scratch every day using high-quality, local, nutritious ingredients, only to watch both of my children scowl at their plates and go hungry rather than consume homemade butternut-squash soup or authentic ratatouille. My children have more insufferable self-imposed dietary restrictions than a typical sophomore at Oberlin College, subsisting entirely on a diet of crackers, black beans, Colby cheese and high-fructose corn syrup. It had come to this: now they won't even eat pizza.

In the end, I ate his pizza and did not give him a gummi bear. The stubbornness, it runs strong in my family.

* * * * *

That noontime interaction was positively quaint compared to what I had to endure in the afternoon.

My daughter, charmed by the previous day's warmth, had decided she would wear a sleeveless dress before we went out to the playground to finally see all the other neighborhood children (who've been cooped up in their glass, modernist houses with unhappy hipster parents since October). While I honestly didn't care what she wore, her bare arms always vex a certain neighbor who must endure questions from her daughters about why they have to wear their winter coats until the summer solstice while my daughter gets to run around all spring like a trollop. I'd offer the truth: Sorry girls, it's just that she's the ward of a sloppy, borderline-negligent stay-at-home father. But on this occasion I just put my foot down and insisted on sleeves until the mercury hits sixty degrees.

This created quite the brouhaha.

The tantrum lasted about an hour. Every effort to soothe or proffer compromises was rebuffed. Every step forward brought us two steps back. It was as if any concession meant Spring had not come after all, that she possessed some sort of sartorial control over the seasons. Once I did manage to cajole her into a sweater and leggings, but she went into histrionics over a hole in her sock. We're talking Linda-Blair-Level-Five-Max-von-Sydow's-in-the-room histrionics. I stood there, brimming with frustration---and let's be honest, rage---trying to explain the logic of how simple it would be to exchange the damaged sock for an intact one. But apparently we're not all born reasonable. When you're five nothing boils down to the Aristotelian syllogisms you'll one day learn in some painfully dull college deductive reasoning course.  The new sock won't make things better because the old one will still have a hole in it, and no matter what your father says, that totally matters. In one dark moment I admit I understood how some parents think it makes sense to throw a misbehaving, disrespectful little kid over a lap and whack her until she stops, hoping, I guess, in a momentary lapse of reason to install a simple logic: if you want something, and scream because you aren't getting it, you will get whacked. A consequence. A catharsis.

I'm not in the business of passing judgment, but I'm still hippie enough to believe I shouldn't hurt someone I love just to solve a problem of words. Instead, I reached over and whipped the sock from her foot, stuck both forefingers in the hole and ripped the entire thing apart with one swift separation of my fists.

There was a moment of silent awe at this unexpected development. Then the waterworks started anew as she clutched the severed sock to her chest like a newly-beheaded puppy. I almost felt guilty. Between tears she communicated something about how she wouldn't stop crying until her mother sewed her beloved holey sock back together, and I left the room and closed the door until she worked through all this on her own.

* * * * *

At the dinner table that evening, she sat listening in silence while I related the tale of the day's epic tantrum to my wife. An hour later, I sat away from their din in my bedroom, staring at the computer when she came to the doorway, and without words crossed the room and climbed up into my lap, saying nothing as she rested her forehead on my shoulder for a long while that night.

This one was discovered during my days scrapping abandoned Detroit public school libraries before the snow ruined everything. It's so silly and deeply earnest I just had to make fun of it. Text is my own. The book is available on amazon if seeing the original text is that important to you.

This is Reginald Blaine Van Hoof III. His family has lived in their lovely brownstone on the Upper Upper West Side for many generations. His father is a hardworking investment banker with Goldman Sachs. One time Reginald took the 3 train to try to see his father, but he wasn't at the office. Reginald's mother gave him a stern look when he returned. "Someday you'll see your father," she promised.

One day, a monkey came through his window and handed him a large lollipop. "Reginald," he said. "Your father has sent me bearing this magical gift. He wishes he could spend more time with you, but he's busy earning the money to pay your Princeton tuition and Ivy Club dues so that one day you too may be paid millions to manipulate the markets with a mere modicum of intelligence. That's how all this works. Oh, and he also bangs a lot of hookers (don't tell your mom)." 

"Wow," said Reginald. "A Magic Lollipop! I wonder what it can do!"

[click here to see the rest of the book]